Aside from resources, TSX had a big run

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When recapping the performance of North American stock markets in 2012, the story usually sounds something like this: the Americans indexs rocked, Canada's sucked.

The headline numbers prove this quite clearly. Last year the S&P 500 returned roughly 12 per cent; the S&P/TSX Composite Index returned a paltry 2 per cent.

But, it turns out, there's more to the story. Canadian returns were hindered by the rocky energy and mining sectors, which account for roughly 50 per cent of the index.

However,if you strip these out, you'll see a wildly different picture. In fact, ignoring energy and resources, our numbers look a lot like those from the U.S. The other TSX sectors combined (everything from consumer staples to REITs to financials) returning an average of 13 per cent from the start of 2012 until now.

Energy names, on the other hand, lost 7 per cent, and mining companies were down about the same amount. (Keep in mind the Composite Index doesn't have junior mining names, which performed much worse.)

An important note: these returns assume equal weighting for each stock, whereas the sub-indices you can pull up on Bloomberg weight each company by their market value. (The biggest difference is seen with mining names, where the S&P/TSX Materials index fell by a larger amount last year). Still, the trend remains the same.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear that everything is gloomy on Bay Street. Sure mining shops are suffering, but companies such as retailers are now much more likely to issue some equity because of their strong stock price.

The downside is that this isn't so friendly for your personal investing account. If you're still timid about the mining and energy rebounding, finding a fairly valued stock in other sectors is quite the task these days.

Some examples of just how high success stories have soared: Aimia Inc.'s up 29 per cent; Alimentation Couche Tard Inc.'s up 62 per cent; Saputo Inc.'s up 24 per cent; Brookfield Asset Management's up 31 per cent; and Royal Bank of Canada's up 15 per cent. Beating those returns could be hard.